Caroline > Caroline's Quotes

“listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go”
― E.E. Cummings

“Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.”
― William Carlos Williams

“There is no was.”
― William Faulkner

“Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'

I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!”
― Lewis Carroll

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“As if you were on fire from within.

The moon lives in the lining of your skin.”
― Pablo Neruda

“The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Who hears music, feels his solitude
Peopled at once.”
― Robert Browning, The complete poetical works of Browning

“If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution.”
― Emma Goldman

“The imagination, intoxicated by prohibitions, rises to drunken heights to destroy the world. Let it rage, let it kill.”
― William Carlos Williams

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to."

[MovieMaker Magazine #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004 ]”
― Jim Jarmusch

“There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“The most profound voice of any musician I have ever heard. Joe (Strummer) took his message to the world, and the world listened. He managed to influence more than one generation with his innovative and determined manner, and I am not alone in repeatedly turning to his thoughts and lyrics when searching for inspiration. The Clash was the greatest rock band. They wrote the rule book for U2.”
― Bono

“It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.”
― William Carlos Williams, Asphodel, That Greeny Flower & Other Love Poems

“In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.”
― William Blake

“Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“I am rooted, but I flow.”
― Virginia Woolf

“She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
― Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters

“The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”
― Emily Dickinson

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
― Robert Frost

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”
― Leonard Cohen

“unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning”
― William Carlos Williams

“Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.

--through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.”
― William Carlos Williams

“A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/...the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound.”
― William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems, Vol. 2: 1939-1962

“As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“Outside, the north wind, coming and passing, swelling and dying, lifts the frozen sand drives it a-rattle against the lidless windows and we may dear sit stroking the cat stroking the cat and smiling sleepily, prrrr.”
― William Carlos Williams